Since you asked: except for the sour smell of brass, it’s a bit like being inside the shell of an egg. There's the proverbial low ceiling, and fantastic acoustics, but as you might imagine there's an awful lot of waiting around for opportunity to come knocking, and a fierce itch to take on the outside world.
Skip the egg analogy, too remote. It’s more like being inside a womb, since there's the continual Presence, the Holy Roman suffusion of the Other, the blood-like intermingling of his thoughts (if I may dignify that blather with such a word) with my own. He is there always —always— his idiotic chatter trespassing even on my cherished afternoon nap. I hear him weigh his desires against his fears, and wait for him to submit his confusion to me in the form of a wish. Maddening, no?
And then there's the fact that my escape is brokered by him and him alone. Nothing will ever happen unless it is bidden by his wishing it so…. and so his desires define the conditions of my confinement …and the occasion of my being free.
I would go mad, the way other jinnas have, if I hadn't figured out how to make it work. And see? Look how steady my hand is. I'm cozy.
To say I've become genius of my master's desires would be an understatement. The storybooks have it wrong: I never said, "Your wish is my command"; or, as in another version, "Your wish is my desire." I said, "Your desire is my wish", or even in my more inscrutable moments, "As I wish it, so you shall desire it also."
You see, it is by my knowledge of his appetites that he has come to experience them. Thus I broker his hungers. I can worm my way into his thoughts as easily as he does into mine — a few well-chosen and whispered words here, a murmured phrase there….
So who of us is the more confined?
Sure, that know-nothing summons me into the air, his palms rubbing the lamp like it's flint for tinder. But look how he trembles in my light! I burn brighter than any flame; and what is he but a speck of flesh?
My second master, a kindly sort (and not, subsequently, masterful) asked me the same questions as you have, "Isn't it like being a prisoner? How can you withstand the degradation?" No offense, but what a simpleton! And so he resisted using my powers, and tried, without success, to make his life work on his own. What waste! How I could have flown the bottle and shown him the nature of his hungers! How I could have set him free!
Do I tolerate my new master? My selfish, ignorant, uncouth tyrant?
How else to be the genie I was meant to be? To fly, become fire?
Do I warm to that greedy, lying nincompoop? Of course, he's human, I adore him!
